Quakecon has come and gone, gibs have been aged, the Great Lord Carmack hath spoken, and yet again nothing was mentioned about Doom 4. But what have appeared are Bethesday-based screenshots. There’s no point in reposting the Rage pics, as they’re all the same ones we had a week ago for our hands on, so you can see them there. But below there are the latest batch from Prey 2.

I beg to differ. It would have looked “fantastic” if only the year was 2004-2005, but now?link to pcmedia.gamespy.com
Higher texture resolution and few extra scene lights shouldn’t fool anyone anymore. I feel like I’m time trap for 7 years now …I’m growing weary now.
Sorry for trolling.

When people say “This looks fantastic”, it’s quite possible that their opinion is not based on counting how many pixels per dilithium crystal in each screenshot.

Some of us look at a screenshot and FEEL something. (It’s completely unrelated to the number of latest-engine tickboxes.) We may even struggle to explain WHY we feel something positive about these screenshots, but we do.

For me, yes these screenshots look fantastic. Your opinion may differ – I have no problem with that. Just wanted to point out…. our methods of appraisal may be quite different?

(Also, maybe the Internet has desensitized me to all weird things, or maybe these pictures are just too dark and murky, but I’m not actually seeing any tentacles. She looks more a Minbari with hair than Twi’lek. Suppose it may be a hair-and-tentacles middle ground.)

I’m not sure Prey was good or popular enough to rock any boats if this one varies from it (c.f. Fallout or X-Com), so I guess it’s a bit of free familiar brand power at a very low Angry Internet Men cost if they then want to change everything.

I kinda now wanna play a game where you’re the marketing department of a games company and you have to find ways to stave off attacks from Angry Internet Men every time a creative designer gets an original thought.

As much as I like the design of the characters and their surroundings – why the heck do they cast black shadows and have white speculars instead of colored ones? That artificial plastic look already looked stupid in Doom3, it looked stupid in Prey and it does look stupid again in Prey2.
Apart from that I hope the gameplay is as good as Prey’s. I quite enjoyed it.

White speculars are not the issue, the issues are over-bright speculars. Coloring the spec changes a lot more than you think, white is generally used as it will react to most situations correctly (i.e it will be noticeable in dim lighting, as well as bright lighting even if the diffuse is a different color). If you take a look at the doom3 assets, you will see that they are mostly white, but they’re also insanely bright, this then linked with the interaction leads to ‘plastic zombies’. In the case of these images, most of the specular is actually coming from the shading it seems. In any case I’m not sure what you mean with ‘black shadows’, the normalmaps will be dark when not lit, and depending on the ambient lighting setup and normal strength that might look black, however its not some kind of ‘make it black’ magic.

Stylish, but makes me of course think “why do these people not like useful lighting?”.
It’s pretty, in red tones, blue tones, green tones… And you never see an actual bright light. I understand for a pub or a danceclub, or even outside by night. But what about the rest? Do these people only like dark athmospheres? It’s supposed to be a living city, I expect to see useful lights.

Six years ago we got screenshots at glorious 1920×1200 or even 2560×1600 resolution. These days, (THANKS TO CONSOLES), we get slightly smaller screenshots. A lot smaller. Someone might call these screenshots thumbnails and the thumbnails thumbnails of thumbnails. That’s a weird word, too.

You could argue that a group of humanoid species would all want to congregate because their anatomy would create shared interests such as a nice suit or, you know, sitting on a stool in a murky bar. Any alien that would require extra tailoring would just feel out of place. This reasoning is entirely watertight.

So many bipedal humanoids. That’s all well and good, but give me some Huts, some John Carpenter’s The Things, some Elcor, some Aliens, some Daleks, some Broodmaster. Give me weird manta rays and oozy oozingtons and aliens that locomote by rolling or tumbling.

Looks great but the neon constrastyness just looks exhausting. I thought the same in the trailer.
It really seems like a game well worth squinting through, but man I hope they change it up from time to time.